


Couriers of the Dead

by buttcat



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, I sure don't - Freeform, Supernatural - Freeform, au i guess, ghost things, ghost!beverly, what a mess, who even knows where this thing will end up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-25 18:33:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1658285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttcat/pseuds/buttcat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As soon as Beverly Katz gets her hands on solid evidence for the Ripper case, Hannibal Lecter murders her, slices her into bits, and eats her kidneys. But even all that's not enough to stop her, and she returns - albeit in a less fleshy form - to continue her search for justice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm cOPING DONT LOOK AT ME

_Doesn't it figure,_ Beverly thinks,  _that as soon as I've got actual proof, I die._

She'd laugh, but one of Hannibal's solid, cold hands is pushing firmly against her esophagus, and she's hard up for air. She's sort of half-halfheartedly struggling, pulling at the sleeve of his stupid plaid suit - she's always hated those damn suits, all that money and _this_ is what he buys - but she knows she's done for, understands the cold animal feeling scrabbling against the walls of her gut. She's stumbled into his territory, the heart of his lair, and in penance she's going to die down here, in this goddamn - this _murder dungeon._ Will Graham was right! He's right, and probably not a murderer to boot, but instead of listening to him they've added him to Dr. Chilton's private lunatic menagerie (and, for that matter, where the _hell_ is Jack), and because of that she's here with this  _asshole -_

She squirms around as best she can, and though the red haze that's steadily drifting over her vision, glares at him from the corner of her eye. He smiles at her. The _nerve._

If she could she'd spit at him, but she really doesn't have the control over her faculties necessary to do that sort of thing. Her sleeve-tugging has devolved into a series of weak twitches, more reflex than anything else. Everything is going dark and blotty around the edges and all she can see is that stupid, self-satisfied little grin.

 _This is really unfair_ _,_ she thinks sourly, and then blacks out.  

 

Beverly Katz is dead. 

The fact comes as easily to her as breathing had. As soon as she opens her eyes, she knows it with an assurance that usually comes only from hours of practice and familiarity, as if she were a master lifting their violin effortlessly to the nest between neck and shoulder:  _I have been murdered._

It's not as disturbing as she thought it might be. It doesn't hit her as some immense revelatory truth, and she comes to no staggering, heart-rending conclusions in its presence. Instead, it's just there, a new part of her. Beverly Katz: black hair, dark brown eyes, kinda tall, dead.

She knows her body is there and mostly accounted for because underneath it she can feel thousands of tiny, shifting bodies, a whole mound of them, wriggling and furry and pushing her steadily forward through the strange, opalescent void that's swirling all around them.

"Bees," she says, and like that she can hear them as if they'd always been there, their tiny wings buzzing away in coordinated effort to keep her aloft. For a moment her mind boggles at the impossibility - she's solid and pretty muscular, too, so most fully grown men'd have trouble lifting her, let alone clouds of bees - but then she remembers, _dead,_ and the doubts clear away like fog.

She sits up and the bees begin to jitter beneath her more frantically than before. What was it Jimmy'd said about bees? They were a Christian symbol of something-or-other, right? But she wasn't Christian, so - 

The sky splits directly above her, whirling ominously. The bees are going _nuts_. 

Curious, she stands up -   

There's a sensation like being sucked down a drainpipe and then she's dropped, without warning or pause, directly in front of Will Graham, who is dressed in his Sunday best, hair as tangled and unwashed as ever. He looks like absolute hell. He's doing that shuddery thing with his face that he does when he's gearing up to do something he'd really rather not, rubbing at his sweaty, unshaven cheeks with the palms of his hands.     

It's his crime-scene face, one Beverly's seen a hundred times before, though now it's particularly dour. It's the face he wears when he's got a corpse to interview, which can only mean she's been dropped off at some poor fool's last performance.

Wait. _Not just any poor fool,_ she thinks.

She sees the plates out of the corner of her eye and her stomach drops. There's her profile, preserved in glass. The rest of her is spread out like so many playing cards, one sliver in each case, her innards carefully displayed for all to see. It's strangely intimate and she's suddenly wishing Will wasn't there to see her like this, that they'd sent someone else, someone anonymous, someone who didn't have to care quite as much. At least Hannibal was kind enough to preserve some vestige of her modesty, her pants and jacket sliced up with the rest of her -      

Oh, God, her jacket. Her poor, beautiful red-leather jacket that she'd spotted at the goddamn motorcycle dealer's and near-instantly fallen in love with. It was one of her favorites, one-of-a-kind, the sort of jacket she trusted to see her through crime scenes and gunfights and bad dates, and here it was chopped up into goddamn sashimi. Her ire at Hannibal, before only a half-forgotten ember in her chest, flared into life once more. The _bastard._ She'd run his entire wardrobe through a shredder. (Could she do that? Would she even be able to stay here much longer? She wasn't quite sure how this death thing would work).

Will is breathing heavy and quivering and - looking directly at her? He's staring, his eyes tracking hers like they'd never done in life.  _He can see me. He can see me._

"Show me," she says, and he swallows in a deep breath, closes his eyes.

There is a moment of nothingness and she thinks it might be over, she'll never reach the end of it now, the bees grow louder and closer and she can feel them moving beneath her throat - and then Will Graham is behind her, his hand is at her neck, he's pressing and pressing. It's so much like Hannibal had done it, his hands crushing in on her body, his stance strong and assured, but she can hear Will's laboured breathing above her and his hands are sweaty about her neck.

 _Will couldn't ever actually strangle anyone,_  she thinks absurdly. _They'd slip right out of his hands like a fish._ Mad laughter wells up in her throat, but behind Will's clammy hands are the memories of Hannibal's, and they're unfailable, stoppering the laugh just as they had before.    

"I strangle Beverly Katz," Will says, "looking in her eyes."

She struggles a little, for accuracy's sake. There's no threat in this strangling, no deep-seated fear gnawing at her stomach, and it's not because this is Will - well, it's partially because it's Will, and she's really not much afraid of him - but because it's so obviously playacting. She realizes she doesn't have to breathe anyway and throws herself into the fantasy, glaring up at him the same way she had with Hannibal. Might as well make the most of it.

"She knows me," Will says, panting, "and I know her."

 _Damn right you do,_ Beverly thinks.

"I expertly squeeze the life from her," he says, "rendering her unconscious." 

Beverly lets out a few last dramatic squeaks and lets herself go limp in Will's arms. He's so _cl_ _ammy._ She can feel his damp skin through the thin hospital jumpsuit they've kitted him in, and it's markedly less pleasant than the thick layers of Hannibal's suit. It's a relief when he drops her. 

"I freeze her body, preserving shape and form," he says, and she can feel the ice cling to her limbs, crust in her hair. She can't move, she realizes, but she finds it doesn't particularly bother her. It's playacting.    

But then, "so I can more cleanly dismantle her," Will says, and there is a  _saw_ buzzing inches from her forehead and she'd scream if she could but her lips are locked with frost and she can't move an inch to protect herself, even as the saw is drawing closer and closer and humming a centimeter from her scalp. There are bees buzzing beneath her skin, against the backs of her eyes and she  _bursts_ outward from herself.

There's a second of confusion where she hovers in midair, weightless, and then she feels the tug of singularity and pulls herself inward again. She reincorporates next to Will in time to see the focused intensity in his eyes as he slides her forward along the table, feeding her to the blade. "She cuts like stone," Will says, and Beverly watches herself splinter apart.    

"What the hell," she says. Were she alive her heart would be beating a mile a minute, but as it is she feels nothing but the gentle flutter of tiny wings against the inside of her rib cage. She shouldn't be surprised - she'd seen the glass plates, seen her insides on display - but she hadn't been ready for _this,_ she hadn't been ready for the body she'd been inhabiting to be sliced up like deli meat. She certainly hadn't been ready to watch  _Will,_ of all people, run her corpse through a saw with a care and intensity she'd never before seen in him. 

She doesn't have much time to consider it, though, as Will's moved on to the next step, the sheets of glass moving before them as if by some giant invisible hand. 

"I pull her apart, layer by layer - like she would a crime scene," Will says, and there she is, just as they found her - spread wide, more naked than naked. Beverly had seen hundreds of corpses in her lifetime, all manners of grisly death, but none of it could have prepared her to stare into her own dead eyes.       

She expects him to pull back at this point, tug himself back into reality, but he isn't quite finished. "I will find no usable evidence," he continues, his eyes fixed on a point just beyond the glass cases, "but she found something."

Beverly follows his gaze and sees nothing - blood, glass, the wall beyond - and she finds herself wondering, not for the first time, what "reality" meant exactly to Will Graham. What, even, did it mean to her? She'd just unincorporated herself, after all. She was dead, sliced to bits, and she was still communicating - to a point - with the living. Whatever reality she'd come to occupy was beginning to encroach into Will's.

"What did I take from her?" Will asks the room, eyes continuing to track some unseen party. Beverly remembers, sharply, the conjecture Will had posed during their conversation earlier: that Hannibal was eating the organs he cut out of his victims. _At least,_ she muses,  _he didn't do it while I was still alive._ But the question remains.  

"What _did_ he take," Bev mutters, and Will's eyes snap to hers, narrowing. He squints at her contemplatively. She offers him a little half-smile, a raise of the shoulder. I _certainly don't know. I'm dead._

His eyelids flutter shut, his jaw working, mouth twisted, and then back open again. His eyes are still on her face, a little unfocused, and she thinks he might be about to say something when Jack galumphs into the room. His attention is fully captured, then, and he turns away from Beverly completely.

When he begins speaking he sounds utterly shattered, and she feels a pang of regret for her previous betrayal, her refusal to listen. "I'm sorry," she whispers behind him, for all the difference it'll make. 

"Beverly helped me see it," he says, and goddammit, Will. She can feel the grief radiating from him and wishes she could salve it, stopper it, allow him some peace.   

As he recreates the crime for Jack, they both dance around the subject of Hannibal. Will doesn't want to blame him outright, and she understands. Jack was solid and reliable but also slow to change, like a cliff face. The tiny waves Will was making were hardly enough to change his mind. For real progress to be made, there would need to be a storm.

"Who is he, Will," Jack asks, and there's a tangible pause during which Will shivers and shakes and bites back his tongue. He can't say it so Beverly does instead.

"Hannibal Lecter," she shouts, and Will jumps, peeking over his shoulder and then back at Jack in a series of twitchy, disjointed movements.

"Beverly made her connection to the Ripper," he says at last. "You have to make your own, Jack."

"Then what did I bring you here for," Jack snaps, his voice heavy with scorn. It is, with certainty, the cruelest thing Beverly's ever heard him say to Will. 

Will takes it, nods. Raw emotion ripples across his face and there's so little of the killer he was convicted as present that Beverly's amazed Jack doesn't take his word a little more seriously. "To say goodbye," he finally chokes out, and God, Will, he's going to cry, isn't he. _Jesus,_ _Will, please don't,_ she pleads silently.  _Don't cry for me._  She moves forward as if to embrace his shoulder but her arm meets slippery resistance an inch from his broken body, as if he was surrounded by wet glass. She leans on him anyway, feels him pull his sorrow back into himself as if closing a heavy door, his body shaking with the effort. She rests her head on his shoulder and he looks over at her with full eyes.

 _"_ Get him outta here," Jack shouts into the hallway, and a pair of orderlies hustle through the doorway.

"You weren't supposed to take the straitjacket off," one snaps, his hand falling to his belt. Will closes his eyes, holds his hands out to the side, allows them to manhandle him into his muzzle. He'd be the picture of compliance, head bowed, joints limp, were it not for the steely look in his eyes. Will Graham hasn't given up. 

 

Beverly follows them out of the observatory at a distance, Will on his trolley and the orderlies flitting nervous around him. They're loading him into the van when she finds herself tilting backwards. She anticipates the blow of the ground against her spine, squaring her shoulders, but it never comes. Instead, she continues falling back as if the earth had lost all substance, arms and legs dangling free below her. Far away, as if through a kaleidoscope, she can see the observatory like a statue in a snowglobe, the police milling around it, the van doors shutting with finality behind the trussed figure of Will Graham. Everything's gone milky and soft and as she falls bees begin to loop around her, sometimes alighting on her skin but mostly staying at a busy distance. Her limbs are heavy and her head is heavy and everything is weighty and leaden and Beverly Katz falls, and falls, and falls.   


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in a brief moment of lucidity, i've finished chapter two. i hope it's okay and not too nonsensical!! feel free to yell at me if i've made any glaring errors.

Beverly finds falling is comforting, in an odd way.

It reminds her of being ten years old and coasting her bike down the biggest hill in their neighborhood, fearless, her long dark hair whipping and tangling behind her. It reminds her of being ten years old and having all the time in the world to bicker with her friends over nothing and chase fireflies in the dark and turn her face up to the rain because it was warm and because she was young and because she had nowhere to be. It is warm and sweet and for a long time she lets it ripple through her, falling limp and content, basking in the familiar, carefree summer-ease.   

It is oddly compelling and she thinks, maybe, she wouldn't mind staying like this for a bit, with the bees and the calm and the milky air. _This isn't so bad,_ she thinks.  _This whole death thing -_

And then she remembers. Hannibal looming over her with his solid hands, the cold metal terror of his basement, her body sliced apart and displayed in glass cases. The gaunt figure of Will Graham, eyes bright behind his mask, alone in his humanity.   

With effort she turns the helm of her mind toward him and away from comfort, so that she's again focused and awake and in the present. She feels bogged down in a sea of soft, warm feeling, but she can feel Will standing resolute before her and she seeks him out like he's a lighthouse. Before, when she'd shown up before Will, it was as if she'd been sucked down a drainpipe toward him. This time, though, it was like she was attempting to walk counter to a fierce current.  _Will,_ she thinks, and  _murder,_ and  _Hannibal,_ and she reaches out for that thread of thought and pulls, and then, and _then,_  the fog refuses to part for her but she pushes herself through anyway and claws back into the real world.

It's like surfacing after a long, demanding swim. She doesn't breathe - of course she doesn't breathe, she's _dead_ \- but she feels the same intense fullness, the same glorious sated feeling that comes with a first breath. It is good.

Will is there, she sees, on a dumpy little bed. _The mental hospital,_ she realizes. For a brief moment she sees he looks a little better than he had at the observatory - his posture more self-assured, his face relaxed, hands resting limp on his knees - but as soon as he spots her, his countenance crumples into misery and he's just as haggard as before. He tries to press inward on himself, his shoulders scrunching up. 

"Good to see you too," she snorts. "The last time I came to see you, you weren't even half this cheerful."

"Last time you came to see me," Will hisses, his lips hardly moving, "You were alive." 

"You haven't lost your signature charm, I see," Beverly says. "The mumbling's new, though."

"Cameras," Will says into his lap.

"Ah," Beverly says. "You don't want Chilton to see you talking to yourself."

 Will doesn't reply. She stares at him slumped on his bed, sallow and unkempt, his eyes empty and tired, and she feels a rush of compassion for him.  

"Will. I believe you." 

Will shakes his head, lets out a dry laugh. His face twitches through a series of emotions - grief, loathing, guilt, mirth - and he runs a hand through his dark, stringy hair. "Great," he says dryly. He laughs again, spitting it out as if it were poison, bows his back further, buries his face in his hands. He's not crying - _thank God_ \- but he's shaking anyway, shoulders shuddering with each inhale.

"Um," says Beverly. "Hey. It's... uh, it's okay." She goes to pat him consolingly but she finds, as it had been earlier, that her hand is stopped by an invisible barrier. Will's ignoring her anyway, digging his fingernails into his face, the skin around them going white with pressure.

Beverly hovers at a distance. She'd gone into forensics and not, say, psychiatry, for a reason. She thinks herself perfectly sociable, generally personable (if maybe a little blunt), and more than capable of functioning in a professional environment, but dealing with these sorts of emotional things really wasn't her forte. The same mechanism that makes her an unshakable forensic scientist, that well-practiced ability to shoulder through even the grisliest murders with a grin and a dark joke, it prevents her from being any comfort whatsoever in times of emotional strife.

If only Hannibal had killed Alanna instead, so _she'd_ be here to help Will, not Beverly. Alana  _likes_ that kind of thing! She goes out of her way to comfort people!   

Beverly flips through her mental index of consolatory advice - _you'll get out of this, it'll be fine, Hannibal can't possibly eat_  everyone - and remembers, in a flash of brilliance, the conversation Will'd had earlier in the observatory with Jack. _Beverly helped me see it._   

 She goes to sit beside him on the bed, is quietly surprised when she finds that she _can_ \- she hasn't really yet explored to what extent she's able to interact with the physical world, so for now it's touch-and-go - and leans in as close as she can, trying to force herself into his field of vision. "Will, it's not your fault," she says. "That I'm dead, I mean. It's not. You warned me, but I went anyway. Of my own volition. Not because of you, or because of Jack, but because I was reckless and refused to listen. So, just, I don't know," she says, waving her arms dramatically. "Don't blame yourself. Okay?" 

Will's removed his nails from his face, but he's still refusing to look up. "That doesn't mean anything," he says. "I'm trying to absolve myself of guilt. I'm forcing," and he chuckles, "self-absolution upon myself."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Beverly snaps, but Will's head has jerked up to face the cell door, his eyes steely. There are footsteps down the corridor, a cane clacking against the tile floor. He's pointedly ignoring her. 

She's having none of it. "I'm not Hannibal, Will. I don't enjoy sorting through your cryptic bullshit."

But now Chilton's stopped in front of the cell door, and Will's staunchly pretending he can't hear her. She rolls her eyes as theatrically as she can and stands to loiter in the far corner.  

"You asked for me?" Chilton says.  

"Yes," Will says, and there's a pause where he's considering the two orderlies Chilton's brought along with him. "I wished to discuss the parameters of our relationship."

"Certainly," Chilton says. "I can only hope it's to express your increased interest in my treatments."   

"Something like that," Will says. "Could we move to a more private location, if you don't mind?"

Chilton smiles tightly, gestures to the orderlies. The larger one, thick about the neck and shoulders, goes to handcuff Will, and the other watches intently, poised to intervene if necessary. The big one pauses when he gets close. 

"Is your face all right?" he asks, his eyes running over the nail marks on Will's cheeks. He's got a bit of a lisp. 

"It's fine," Will grunts, shaking off the man's proffered hand.   

They get him out of the cell and lead him down the hall, and Beverly trails behind, studying the other patients they pass. Most of them are sitting comatose on their bunks, awake but unaware, but a few are pacing and speaking to themselves. One or two leer at Chilton as he passes by. "Hey, sweetheart," one croons. "Heyyy. You gonna come visit me soon? I miss you, baby..."

His voice fades to nothing as they pass out of the cell blocks and into an open room. To the side there's a row of plexiglass rooms with heavy doors. Beverly's struck with a wave of recollection when she sees them, remembering her visits with Will to talk shop with him in those very rooms. Just like when she'd met with Will, he's cuffed to the desk in the middle so that he's got a limited range of motion in his arms, and the two orderlies stand guard outside. Chilton arranges himself stiffly across from Will, and Beverly, in a fit of brash playfulness, perches herself saucily on the table. Will raises his eyebrows at her.     

 Chilton follows his gaze. "What are you looking at, Will?"

"No one. Nothing."

"Do you see someone there, Will?" 

"No. There's no one there. I'm admiring the wallpaper." 

"Will, if you're experiencing hallucinations again - " 

"I'm  _not_ hallucinating," Will snaps, and suddenly Beverly understands.  _I'm trying to absolve myself of guilt,_ he'd said. He'd thought he was imagining all of it, everything she'd said. When she'd told him she didn't blame him, he'd thought he was interacting with a mirage, an image his brain had conjured up against his will. It was remarkable that she hadn't thought of it before, she thought crankily, given his rocky mental health. Of course he'd jump to "hallucination" before he thought of - what? A specter? A memory? A ghost? She wasn't too clear on that herself, honestly. She was fairly confident that she wasn't a hallucination, though.     

"I believe we were discussing Hannibal Lecter, Doctor?" Will says.

Chilton smirks. " _I_ was led to believe that we were here to discuss the wide breadth of the therapy and testing you'll happily undergo." 

Will waves his hand. "The tests are secondary. You can put together your menu as you like. But if  you continue to share the details of my therapy with Hannibal Lecter, Doctor Chilton, there won't be much opportunity to continue those tests." 

 

"Is that a threat, Mr. Graham? May I remind you - " 

"What I am saying is that you can't share _anything_  with Hannibal. If he feels you're protecting me, if he feels you've turned against him, he won't hesitate to put you down."  

"I did not come here to allow you to attack my methods, Will," Chilton says sharply. "I assure you, I divulged no pertinent information."

"Yeah, I'm sure," Beverly scoffs.

"Any information at all is _pertinent_ ," Will cuts in, the disdain clear in his voice. "Communicating with him at all gives him more than enough. Lecter is dangerous. He'll take what you give him and build forts from it."

"You overestimate him, William. You've built him into an infallible being in your mind, and that is fettering you from moving forward."

"Maybe," says Will. 

"It's true," Chilton says triumphantly. "Will, you have to trust others to do their jobs." 

"And what's your job?" Will asks. He's put it forward as neutrally as he can, no malice or challenge behind the words. 

"My job is to help you recover your memories. Hopefully, we will be able to use them to expose Hannibal Lecter for what he is."

Beverly immediately spots the numerous holes in this plan, and Will isn't far behind her.    

"Hmm," he agrees, nodding genially. "Right. It's just that there's a problem with that. Jack's shot me down before, you know - he's told me my memories mean nothing. He's probably right. I doubt they'd stand up in court."

"We could convince him otherwise."

"You know Jack. He's not... particularly conceivable."  

"Then what do you propose?"

"Well," says Will. "On my own, I'm not that credible. But there's one other witness who was implicitly guided by the Chesapeake Ripper and lived to talk about it."

"You can't mean Gideon," Chilton squeaks. Will nods.

 "We've both been manipulated by the Chesapeake Ripper. We've both met him. Wouldn't it be interesting," Will says, "if we both pointed toward the same man?"

 

Chilton sits back in his chair. "Yes," he says after a moment. "It would." 

   

Beverly's intrigued by the game Will's playing, his appeals to Chilton, but at the moment another subject is more important to her. 

"Do you really think that?" Beverly asks him as they're escorted back to Will's cell. "That you're hallucinating?"

Will inclines his head minutely, his face a mask, too wary of Chilton's curious eyes burning into them from every angle.

"During the trial - the defense said you'd only hallucinated while you were sick, and not before or since. For all I know, they invented it to make you look better. Sicker."

Will's face doesn't move an inch at the accusation. 

"But you know," she says, and she looks away, remembering. "You called me once. When we were chasing Georgia Madchen, although I guess at the time we didn't know who we were looking for yet. But you called me, and you told me you needed me to verify that you were - that whatever you'd just experienced was real. That it'd actually happened. When I got there you were sounnerved by it all, so terrified, like you'd stumbled across a fresh nightmare. I think of how upset you were in that house and I can't imagine you were an old hand at it. I mean, losing your reality."

They get to the cell. Will turns, allows the orderlies to remove his handcuffs. 

"So I guess it'd be upsetting, seeing things again. Things like me," Beverly says. "Whatever the hell I am. Because what if you're sick again?." 

He waits for the orderlies to disappear past the turn in the hallway before he speaks, his face turned toward the floor. "I'm not."

"I don't think you are, either. I'm not a figment of your fevered imagination."

He considers this. "Doesn't mean I can't still hallucinate. As a healthy man."

"You can choose to believe that you're hallucinating right now, if it makes it easier. I don't think it will, though."

"Oh?"

"You always fought it - the idea that you were mentally ill, not physically ill. You always said you knew what kind of crazy you were, and that hallucinations weren't part of that crazy. So if you're hallucinating now -"  

"Fine! Sure, okay." Will laughs bitterly, his eyes fixed on the dirty floor. "What are you, then?" 

"I don't know! _I_ don't think I'm a hallucination, in any case."

"That's not particularly convincing, you know," Will mumbles. Beverly offers him a shrug.

"Sorry," she says. "I think I might be... well. A ghost." 

"A  _ghost_?" Will's face constricts. She can tell he's mulling the conversation over in his mind, the absurdity of the entire thing - he's arguing with his co-worker, who may or may not be a hallucination, over whether or not she's come back from the dead.

"Look, okay," she says angrily. "I'm just as fucked up over this as you are, all right? I _died._ An esteemed colleague of mine strangled me to death in his basement and mangled my corpse. But hey, I can't rest in peace, of course not, because Will goddamn Graham is in need of assistance or some bullshit, so back I go. I could've hung around in the afterlife but  _no,_ I decided to come back and argue with my surly former co-worker - "

Will looks like a kicked puppy - a really mangy unshaven puppy in a prison jumpsuit - and she can't bring herself to go on. 

"Is that why you're here? To help me?" he says, very softly. A brief silence, and then: "I miss you. I'm sorry."

"I'm here," she says, and it's true. She is. 

**Author's Note:**

> ps. this might take a while to update? i'm not sure. im under some preTTY heavy anti-anxiety meds and pain killer nonsense right now bc im in the middle of surgery and it's really LLY handicapping my ability to type and think ?? i will try later tonight but i ahve the sneaking suspiciou n that everything i produce will be heklla garbage oop


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